Different aspects of managing a communication network have been addressed in prior art with varying results. U.S. Pat. No. 7,043,659 to Klein et al, for example, teaches a system and method which enable flexibility in configuring management behavior of a network management system. A user in said Klein et al patent may specify the management actions to be performed by a management policy and the process to be utilized by the management policy in performing such management actions.
Published U.S. patent application 2005018790 teaches a database wherein data is represented in a manner that expresses the structure inherent in the data as one or more “augmented clauses”, where each clause has a pair (c,G) including a database element c and a group G of group elements g acting on it. A query is encoded in a group theory representation and is executed on the group theory representation of the data to identify database elements and associated group elements satisfying the query.
Management of telecommunication networks involves complexity and has evolved to be sophisticated, assisting in catering several subscribers and network resources for rendering a variety of network services. Generally, in Telecom Management Networks (TMN), subscriber and network resource information is represented in a predominantly hierarchical manner, and, management applications are developed and implemented using the hierarchical information model. There exist known standards that govern the design and use of such models. For example, ITU-T recommendation M.300 and related series of technical recommendations relate to the representation of network resources and information in a hierarchical way. In network management, several different kinds of network service are offered to different subsets of customers. It is known that subscriber provisioning and management, and network inventory uploading are complex and time consuming tasks in telecom networks. In known methods of network management for accessing required subscribers based on predetermined criteria, uploading of network inventory is performed. However, uploading network inventory ends up to be a time consuming process, and results in high operating costs owing to the hierarchical information model. It is also known that it is a time consuming process to access the listings of network resources and services which are being offered to specific subscribers and customers.
A network operator would sometimes need to access a listing of the types of service being offered to subscribers. If the network management intends to offer a promotional service to selected subscribers, the network operator would need to run multiple commands to get information pertaining to the required subset of such subscribers. The operator would then need to run scripts to provision the promotional service. Alternatively, the operator could do computations manually from the graphical user interface. Both approaches are labor intensive, inefficient and uneconomical. The hierarchical representation, also known as containment hierarchy of network resources (e.g., a network port is uniquely represented as Equipment-ID: shelf ID: Subrack-ID:SlotID:PortID) is the primary cause for the inefficiency. It is also noted that day-to-day monitoring and uploading of network inventory is involved with the use of known methods.